Google Wave Tips

Google Maps has been powerfully integrated into Google Wave. Like everything else in Wave, maps can be edited and manipulated in real time and all other members of the wave will be able to see your changes instantaneously. Thus, the Maps gadget in Wave is useful for, again, collaboration; this time, you can share locations, routes, and points of interests, all inside the beautiful Google Maps interface. Watch the video below for a brief, complete rundown of the Maps gadget.

Video

Transcript

Hi, my name is Ian and I’m a blogger at gwtips.com. Here, we’ll take a look at the Maps gadget in Google Wave and how to use it. We’ll also take a look at some of the more practical uses for Maps in Wave too.

First, create a new wave. To add the Maps gadget, click the “More Actions” icon, then select the Maps icon, which looks like a map marker. The Maps gadget has now been added to the wave.

We can interact with the gadget now. The first major tool in the Maps gadget is, obviously, the “Hand” tool. Use this to move around in Maps. I’m in Hilliard right now, but let’s go over to Downtown Columbus.

The second tool that we’ll look at is the “Line” tool. You can draw a line anywhere in Google Maps. So, let’s say you wanted to let your friends know about your favorite walk route through Downtown Columbus. Use the Line tool and draw!

Third, you can use the “Marker” tool to highlight points of interest to your friends. On the walk that I have mapped out, I go past the Columbus College for Arts and Design. Let’s put a marker on right now. In the second field, I can even add some comments here.

The “Polygon” tool is useful too. It allows anybody to highlight anything on the map. Again, just click and drag.

The last tool we’ll take a look at is Maps’ search feature. You can look up any location and easily place a marker on the map for the entire wave to see.

And that’s it! Happy mapping!

Google Wave largely appeals as a collaboration tool. This is really helpful for businesses and organizations who need to brainstorm, communicate, and bounce ideas off of each other in real-time. Thankfully, Google Wave promises to have a variety of tools available to make collaborating as easy and natural as possible.

One of these tools is “Aunt Rosie” the translation robot. Aunt Rosie gives you the ability to communicate with someone who might even speak a different language than you. Whatever you type is translated into the language of your choice. Here’s how you can do it.

First, you’ll need to add “aunt-rosie@appspot.com” to your contacts list.

Then, you’ll need to create a new wave and add “aunt-rosie@appspot.com” to the wave.

Once you start typing something, Rosy will load and you’ll get a drop down box to select the language you would like to translate into. You’ll notice there is quite a selection of languages available. As you’ll see in the picture below, I selected Spanish.

If you choose to reply with a new blip within the wave, unfortunately, you will have to reselect the language you’d like to translate into. However, one of the advantages of Aunt Rosie over other translation bots (e.g. Translabot) is that Aunt Rosie translates what you type in real-time. This eliminates the need to press a “translate” button when you are finished typing.

For the most part, I’ve found Aunt Rosie to work pretty well. I have noticed for some languages that not all my words will translate, but this is expected from any translator from what I’ve experienced.

What do you think of Aunt Rosie?

You can even integrate your Twitter account into Google Wave by using a Twitter extension. It’s really easy. Here’s how.

First, you’ll need to add tweety-wave@appspot.com to your contacts.

Secondly, you’ll need to create a new wave and add Tweety to the wave. When you do this, you’ll want to make sure that your pop-up blocker is turned off because the Tweety extension will be added to the wave and a window will pop-up asking you for your Twitter login details.

Enter your Twitter login details when the window pops up.

Once you have logged in Tweety the Twitbot will display all your friend’s Twitter updates and allow you to update your Twitter status.

There are a couple things worth mentioning. One, the usernames of the Twitter users that you are following show up as “username@tweety-wave.appspot.com.” Because of this, you can’t click on these usernames and view their Twitter page. Hopefully, this would be changed in the future.

Secondly, any participant of the wave with Tweety can tweet on behalf of the authenticated Twitter user. So that means, if I am logged in with Tweety, and I add Tim to the Wave, Tim could tweet from my account, since I am logged in under that wave.

Overall, I don’t see the Tweety extension having the same power as say an application like TweetDeck or logging into your Twitter account from the web, but it is beneficial to be able to centralize Twitter right into your Google Wave account.